Suwayda is well-equipped for protests. The central square of the city, home to one of Syria’s larger minority communities, hosts the crowds of weekly – or sometimes even daily – demonstrators calling for the representation and public services they have demanded for years.
Long before the fall last month of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the southern province of the same name had become a byword for resistance to rule by Damascus, unafraid to protest despite Assad’s crackdown on dissent and his hollow pledges to protect communities like theirs.
The area is overwhelmingly filled with members of the Druze sect, who follow an esoteric form of Islam whose adherents span a swath of Lebanon and Syria, including the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Even before Assad fled last month as an insurgency reached Damascus, residents of Suwayda had been demanding a secular state that enshrined minority rights, and are now emphatically insisting their voices be heard in the new Syria.
“Since last August until now we’ve been protesting daily,” said Alia Kuntar, a lawyer, after the weekly demonstration held in Suwayda City’s central square in front of a metal pavilion emblazoned with the words “Peace to all Syrians”. “And we will keep protesting until we get the state we want. We haven’t felt any crackdown from the new government, but equally we didn’t see any action on the ground in response to our demands.”
She added: “Of course, we’ll increase our demonstrations until we get what we want.”
Protests in Suwayda began in August 2023 for increased public services and quickly spilled into demands for Assad to go, in a place that his regime had long ignored. The southern province was a rare pocket of resistance for well over a year before his rule collapsed amid a wider insurgency at the end of 2024. It now presents a challenge for Syria’s caretaker government, which is led by the Islamists who toppled Assad.
Assad’s fall has quelled demands for a Druze state, but local religious figures, militia leaders and demonstrators say they are happy to be a thorn in the side of the new authorities.
Protesters said their demands for improved public services and a secular state remained unchanged despite the new leadership in Damascus, putting the caretaker authority under pressure. Adding to this friction is an expanding Israeli presence around the Golan Heights, a mountainous region with a large Druze population that has been part-occupied by Israel for decades.
Sitting among the cobalt-blue furnishings of a meeting room outside Suwayda, the Druze militia leader Laith al-Balous, who heads the Sheikhs of Dignity armed faction, chose his words carefully when discussing how Damascus should respond to Israel’s expanding military presence. He said he believed Syria’s neighbours would respect Syrian sovereignty once Damascus relauncheed its military.
As many as 5,000 members of Suwayda’s coalition of Druze militants were impatient to join an as-yet-unformed new Syrian army, he said, adding his group was waiting until that moment before any discussion of disarming itself.
“It would be an honour for us to join the new army, providing the government in Damascus has a clear vision and strategy,” he said, delicately. “I sent a delegation to the new defence ministry, to understand the army’s strategy and fighting ideology. We want to know: who is our enemy in Syria?”
The Druze in general, Balous said with a smile, “are optimistic about ties with Damascus, and expect to see benefits from the government there. If in future these don’t arrive, there are steps to be taken we can talk about in time. I’ve heard good statements from the Damascus caretaker government, but we’re waiting to see things implemented on the ground.”
Loyalty, Balous said, would come when the Druze saw how a new government performed. “But at the same time, we don’t want to wall ourselves off, we want to participate before drawing conclusions.”
Yasser Hussein abu Fakher, a Druze religious leader and key member of the top religious council, said Suwayda’s religious and political representatives had sent “an olive branch to the new transitional government”, and welcomed Assad’s downfall.
But the view from Suwayda was that the transitional leadership was not there to talk about its concerns. They had recently welcomed a visiting delegation from Damascus, Fakher said, but those ministers had come to check on their respective departments such as health and policing, not to discuss the formation of a civil state or how minority groups such as the Druze could be represented in future.
“We prefer to call it a caretaker government, as until now it’s not elected, there’s no constitution or clear laws,” Fakher said. “We want a new government that should be a civil state, one that is democratic, respects all sects, and believes in freedom. This caretaker government cannot make decisions about the strategic direction of Syria.”
Standing outside the central mosque after the weekly protest, Kuntar said demonstrators were, however, impatient to see change. “We want to hear [the de facto Syrian leader] Ahmed al-Sharaa’s plan for how to change things after Assad,” she said. “But we’re yet to hear anything from him.”
Komai Obeid, 24, a medical student, said he had joined some of the first anti-government protests in Suwayda but had been too frightened of arrest to continue. Now, he said, he was finally free of the fear protesting could see him arrested and was embracing protests as a form of political engagement with Damascus that was impossible under the Assad regime.
“When the civil war in Syria started I was 10 years old – for my generation, there was no sense of belonging here and it was easier to call for separation,” he said. “But now, no way.”
Obeid’s sense that the Druze community was cut off from the government in Damascus had evaporated as the Assad regime crumbled, and while he was once convinced he would graduate and leave the country, he now wanted to stay, he said. His determination to rebuild, he added, meant happily making demands of the new authority in Damascus.
“Now if we feel we dislike anything about the country we can finally express it – and we want the government to help us build our new homeland,” he said.
